Human beings have been applying makeup to their faces since ancient times, and perhaps even longer than that. In a tomb in the Sumerian city of Ur, from the end of the third millennium B.C., archeologists found a tiny gold, shell-shaped cosmetics case containing a makeup kit. The Egyptians kept cosmetic ingredients in lumps in little bags made of leather or linen. The lumps were ground on a palette to a fine powder and were applied to skin with a moistened stick of wood, ivory, silver, glass or bronze. Peter James and Nick Thorp in the book Ancient Inventions (1994) at page 256 describe makeup kits that contained these elements together with the palettes for grinding the lumps into powders. These makeup kits were found in the graves of ancient Egyptian nobility dating back as early as 4000 B.C. Both Egyptian men and women lightened their skin with yellow ochre. Only women used orange paint to make the ochre darker. A rouge of red ochre and fat was applied to the cheeks and a similar mixture was applied to the lips.
Messrs. James and Thorp describe the people of the Indus Valley civilization during the third millennium B.C. as lightening their complexions with a face cream comprising white lead. Cakes of this white lead cosmetic have been found in urban houses of the third millennium period and later periods throughout the world.
Advancement in the technology of cosmetic applicators continues to the present day. U.S. Pat. No. 4,751,193 ('193) describes a cosmetic sampler in which a cosmetic preparation is printed onto a base and a thin, mostly transparent, protective film is arranged above it. The protective film is partially bonded to the base.
A cosmetic sampler described in the '193 patent is usable for testing the color of cosmetic preparations such as nail lacquer, blush, and powder. Application of the preparations utilizing the transparent protective film or smooth base film may result in uneven distribution of the cosmetic preparation on the skin.
E.P. Application 722,676 describes a cosmetic sampler in which at one location of the base, a cosmetic or other material has been applied and another small area of the base has been sprinkled with fiber flecks. The sampler is stamped out or cut to a certain shape in order to serve as an applicator. In other embodiments, this applicator is strip-shaped or is an indentation in the base.